Dr. Paul Amar is the Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and Professor at the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He is a political scientist and anthropologist who speaks seven languages and has published in nine languages. He holds affiliate appointments in Feminist Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and Latin American & Iberian Studies. He has been awarded three Fulbright Fellowships and served as PI for major extramural grants from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Open Society Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Arab Council of the Social Sciences. Before he began his academic career, he worked as a journalist in Cairo, a police reformer and sexuality-rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and as a conflict-resolution and economic-development specialist at the United Nations. 

His books include: Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); New Racial Missions of Policing (2010); Global South to the Rescue (2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); The Middle East and Brazil (2014), The Tropical Silk Road: The Future of China in South America (2022); Cairo Securitized (2023); and Rio as Method (2024). In 2014, his book “The Security Archipelago” was awarded the Charles Taylor Award for “Best Book of the Year” by the American Political Science Association. In 2019, Prof. Amar was awarded Mentor of the Year by the Latin American Studies Program at UCSB.